1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for combined printing of a plurality of pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
Print data processing apparatuses (also known as printer drivers) capable of combined printing of a plurality of print pages on a sheet of printing paper has been developed.
For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-89251 discloses a printing system for combined printing by dividing the size of printable paper into sections in the longer edge direction and laying out pieces of print data for multiple pages, which are reduced in size, into the divided sections, respectively.
Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-233475 discloses a printer driver that, when the number of sheets of paper that are to be output is specified, automatically calculates how many pages should be printed on each sheet of paper and prints all pages on the specified number of sheets of paper.
As another example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2005-78289 discloses a printing controlling apparatus that, taking a “Z folding” of sheets of paper into account, arranges a page with a title into an area having a standard size, whereas other multiple print target pages are collectively arranged into a specified area.
However, when print data for multiple pages including a page on which an image is oriented in a different direction from those on other pages (e.g., some images are in a portrait direction and other images are in a landscape direction) is to be collectively printed on a sheet of paper, the conventional print data processing apparatuses or printer drivers do not arrange and change the direction of the image to facilitate viewing.
According to the conventional techniques, when print data for multiple pages including a page on which an image is oriented in a different direction from others is to be collectively printed onto a sheet of paper, the image oriented in the different direction is rotated in a certain direction and reduced in size so that all the pages can be respectively printed into sections obtained by dividing the sheet of paper.
In the following explanation, the pages that are made up of a series of pieces of print data for multiple pages and have not been laid out yet will be referred to as “logical pages”. On the other hand, the pages that are physically divided and obtained by laying out the print data for the logical pages to be printed onto paper will be referred to as “physical pages”.
For example, let us discuss a situation where each physical page as shown in FIG. 19B is generated by collectively laying out print data for two logical pages onto one page (hereinafter “two-in-one printing”), the logical pages including both portrait pages (each of which shows the image in the proper upright direction when the rectangular sheet of paper is positioned so that the length thereof is placed in the up-and-down direction) and landscape pages (each of which shows the image in the proper upright direction when the rectangular sheet of paper is positioned so that the length thereof is placed in the left-and-right direction), as shown in FIG. 19A. According to the conventional techniques, each of the images in a set of logical pages oriented in a first direction (in the example, the logical pages in the landscape direction, namely, page 2 and page 4) is rotated into a second direction by 90 degrees to be laid out into a half portion of a physical page.
With this arrangement, however, a problem arises where the readability of the document can be very low, depending on the binding position of the pages. For example, in the example shown in FIGS. 19A and 19B, when the binding position is on the left (indicated with a pair of thin black bars in the drawing), the images on the portrait pages are in the proper upright direction in the way shown in the drawings, and the images on the landscape pages can also be viewed in the proper upright directions if the document is held so that the binding position comes to the top. Thus, the readability is not low. However, when the binding position is on the right, to view the images on the landscape pages (namely on page 2 and page 4) in the proper upright direction, the binding position has to be at the bottom. Thus, the readability of the document is low.